Weather simulation is a difficult process, evidenced by the rate with which weather forecasters and meteorologists provide incorrect weather forecasts. “Real world” weather simulation is a computationally expensive process due to the required 3-dimensional modeling of airflow, temperature, precipitation, and the like. Advanced weather simulation machines are generally comprised of supercomputers and high-end graphics workstations, above the price range of an ordinary consumer, and overkill for use in most computer and/or video games.
Due to the extensive advanced weather simulation requirements, present general purpose computers are not suited to perform advanced weather simulations. Advanced weather simulation on a general purpose computer, if possible, would consume all or a significant portion of the computer's resources during the simulation, leaving significantly less resources for other processes running on the computer.
Some computer programs in the simulation genre, however, depend on weather simulation to provide a realistic virtual world in which the simulation takes part. For example, some flight simulation games depend in part on the weather in which the user is flying to determine whether the user should fly under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) or Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). Whether a user is flying VFR or IFR will affect the user's actions, including instrument manipulation and communications with air traffic control (ATC). Some war simulation games and training software depend in part on weather to determine how far a player can see in the virtual world being simulated, which may affect military strategy. War simulation games may also depend on simulated precipitation when determining the range of launched projectiles (e.g., catapults, trebuchets, cannonballs, mortars, arrows and other non-propelled missiles, and the like).
Simulation games presently provide only a limited amount of weather simulation due to the large amounts of computer resources (e.g., processor time and memory) required to effectively simulate weather. For example, some known flight simulation games simulate only one weather type at a time. While weather can be different in different areas of the virtual world in which the user is flying, the weather will appear only of a single type at any given time. More specifically, if the user is flying in overcast skies with a ceiling of 4,000 feet, the virtual world will appear overcast with a ceiling of 4,000 feet in all directions from the user's present location. If the user subsequently flies into mostly sunny skies, the weather might change to mostly sunny skies, but it will do so in all directions. That is, even if the user looks behind his or her plane, the user will only see mostly sunny skies. The user will not see the overcast skies from which the user supposedly flew.
In attempts to make simulation games more real, some simulations games allow limited download of actual weather conditions for use during game play by downloading actual weather conditions prior to the start of a game, and subsequently using the downloaded weather conditions for the duration of the game. While this provides limited realism, it does not alleviate the problem where weather appears the same in all directions, nor does it provide changing and/or continuously real weather during the game.
Thus, it would be an advancement in the art to provide improved realism in weather simulation, including cloud formation and temperature changes, whereby multiple types of weather can be simulated at the same time, and whereby the weather simulation is suitable for presentation on a general purpose computer system without over burdening the computer system such that the computer cannot perform other tasks. It would be a further advancement in the art to provide continuously updated real world weather throughout the duration of game play.